Terrence Malick’s Insufferable Masterpiece

Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life” is insufferable: interminable, madly repetitive, vague, humorless, grandiose. It is also, astoundingly, one of the great lyric achievements of the screen in recent years and a considerable enlargement of the rhetoric of cinema. Years from now, the movie will be remembered as a freshening, even a reinvention, of film language.

The movie has been wonderfully reviewed by Anthony Lane and blogged about by Richard Brody in this space, but the conversation is still raging. I can’t go to a dinner party without hearing an argument about “The Tree of Life.” Any movie that wrecks dinner parties is rare these days. (Had any serious discussions of “X-Men: First Class” recently?) So here’s what I try to blurt out something between the salmon and the strawberries.

The beginning is not promising: a quotation from Job, whispered prayers to God, undulating gaseous colors, indefinite in shape, indeterminate in meaning. We’re in Texas, in the early fifties; a young man, nineteen, one of three brothers, has died; a father (Brad Pitt) and mother (Jessica Chastain) cling to each other on the front lawn on their house, which is where much of the movie will take place. By degrees, the movie changes into a lengthy contemplation of natural phenomena, all suggestive of violent flux—churning water, perturbable gases, bits of the galaxy spun into seeming specks, the sun seen close up as a seething landscape of flame. We get the point: Creation has always gone on; it never ceases. Destruction never ceases, either; both are happening all around the Texas family.

What is there to say about this footage except that it’s extraordinarily beautiful? Half the time, I’m not even sure what, exactly, we are looking at. Are these natural happenings, captured with high-powered telescopic lenses? NASA footage? The work of twelve sexually undernourished nerds sitting in a windowless room? Probably they’re a little of each. And I think Malick might respond that it doesn’t matter. The exploding novae are what we should see if we could—if we had the right vantage point, or if we had enough curiosity and bravery to face the elemental facts of the universe. This use of the telescopic sublime is overwhelming, but, in the midst of awe, a belligerent impression begins to form: a movie that is about everything can’t be about anything in particular.

That impression, however, turns out to be false. Malick returns to the family and begins his story over again, and it takes hold. And it is his approach to this family drama that impresses me as revolutionary. Malick has done away with the sequence as normally understood. Apart from two brief episodes at the dinner table—in both of them the father loses his temper and tries to squash his boys—the drama exists in fragments, with minimal dialogue, and shot by a camera that never, as far as I can see, stays fixed on a tripod. The camera floats, evenly, smoothly, gently, moving behind the actors, around them, underneath them. It communes with them, cutting them off at mid-body, sometimes in mid-forehead. Our intimacy with them is startling. In “The Tree of Life,” the shots are not quite continuous—that is, they don’t match up in the manner of classical shooting and editing, in which a given body movement is carried over from one shot to the next. In itself, that is hardly a surprise: highly fragmented editing has become commonplace in recent years, and much of it is jarring or simply a swindle—say, the whirling movement in bad action movies, in which the mere impression of tumult substitutes for coherent staging and editing in an integrated space. Think of the thrusting, flashing limbs—a sword swinging, an arm lopped, a spurt of blood—in the award-winning “Gladiator.” Who could actually see the fighting in that film?

But if the shots in “The Tree of Life,” strictly speaking, don’t match, you can certainly see everything. The conflict between the father and his oldest boy, out there on the lawn, coheres into physically detailed, dramatically overwhelming sequences. The slight gaps in visual continuity are like pauses for a breath in fervent speech. The moods, the colors, the tonalities are absolutely continuous, the emotions fully worked out. If Malick has reinvented the sequence, he has also reinvented the frame. Among other things, “The Tree of Life” is Malick’s memory off growing up in Texas, and as, Richard put it in his first post,

Memories have no frame; they slide out of a pictorial boundary to remain infinite at the edges, bending around to include oneself—and maybe even several versions of oneself, present and past, as seen from without and from within.

If you want to get a sense of Malick’s boldness, think of Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris.” There you have a perfectly crafted classical frame—the characters firmly and stably planted in space and in clear relation to walls and streets. As Owen Wilson waits for his midnight carriage to take him back to the twenties, backlighting sends a shimmer of light across the top of his head to set him off from the building behind him—which is pretty similar to what Michael Curtiz did with Bogart in “Casablanca.”

Malick’s floating camera lifts us just slightly out of the here and now and achieves what I assume he wants—a sense that these minute spasms of conflict and love are instances in eternity as momentous as the seething gases. A father grasps his son in a tight embrace, both of them too moved to say much of anything. It is commonplace; it is everything.

Photographing the ineffable seems like a contradiction: of all the arts, the cinema depends most on the effable—on matter that reflects light, impressing itself on celluloid treated with silver nitrate or, increasingly, on bit-mapped receptors. But Malick has done it; he has captured spirit. How hard that is! The sense that no act is meaningless, the certainty that we are part of a boundless and endless community (however alone we feel much of the time) is shared by mystics and sentimentalists. Yet Malick makes it palpable. And the use of sublime music seals the palpability—especially the concluding pages of the Berlioz Requiem, whose circling string motifs and quietly thudding drums suggest the utmost consolations of belief, especially in tragedy and death. For long stretches, the moods are sustained, eloquent, encompassing.

Explicitly, Malick offers a Christian view, and a doctrinal view—the way of grace, as the mother whispers right at the beginning. But “The Tree of Life” raises an ornery question: Could another movie, a worldly movie with jokes, sex, work, society—everything that Malick ignores—also capture spirit? Could a secular temperament capture it? A temperament acting outside of religious doctrine?

I admire “The Tree of Life” enormously, but I think it would be less than candid if I didn’t say how far away from it I feel emotionally. At the end, speaking to God of her dead son, the mother raises her arms and says, “I give him to you.” The moment is lovely, and, as an apotheosis of feeling and belief, it’s fully earned by the rest of the movie. But let me say categorically that no woman I’ve known could raise her arms and yield up her son to any God whatsoever.

David Denby has been a staff writer and a film critic at The New Yorker since 1998.